Many people think that to be a successful businessman, you need to come up with a business idea that nobody has thought of.
It may be true to some extent. Million dollar business ideas either need a lot of money as investment or skills that not everyone has.
But here’s the thing – most of us here are not really looking to become millionaires. We are looking for business ideas that give us freedom and the ability to control our lives.
How much money can make that happen? $3000 per month? $5000? Or, $10,000. No matter how much it is, this is money that can be made with a lot of simple or easy to do businesses.
This article is a work in progress. Each week, I will be adding new business ideas and also teach you ways to become successful doing that.
If you are looking at this article below and don’t really find anything exciting, do not worry – keep visiting this page every few days and you should eventually find something that is right up your alley.
I am going to split this article into three major sections – Easy, Intermediate, and Hard. Easy business ideas need little to no skills. Intermediate needs skills that can be learned with a bit of practice, while those ideas I discuss in ‘Hard’ need skills that are a little more advanced.
But know what? I am going to give you the exact tricks necessary for anyone to be able to launch these Hard business ideas too.
If you think you do not really have any skills, do not simply stop at the easy ones. Check out the “Hard” ones too.
So, ready to dive in? Here you go.
Easy Business Ideas
Restaurant Menu Designer
Ever walked into a street-side cafe or restaurant and noticed how old and tattered their menu cards are?
Many cafes and food joints do not bother fixing their menu cards till they have to change pricing or if they are going for a rebranding.
And here lies an opportunity to make money. Follow these exact steps and you make thousands of dollars each month.
Step 1: Before you approach any restaurant with a proposal to design their menu cards, you need something to show them how good you are.
You don’t need any graphic designing experience to do this. Click on this link to visit the Snappa website. Snappa is an extremely simple tool to design anything that you want.
And well, it is FREE to use as well.
Step 2: Once you click and go to the Snappa website, click on the big, bold “Get Started Free” button on the top of the website. You will see a screen like this
Enter the requested details to Get Started.
Step 3: Once you are logged in, you will see a list of different graphics you can create. You won’t find anything called “restaurant menu”. Do not worry. Look for something called “eBook cover”. A restaurant menu looks more or less like this. So you can start from here.
Step 4: Under eBook cover, you will see plenty of predesigned templates. Pick something that is similar to a menu card. I picked this.
Step 5: Now, Snappa gives you all the tools needed to make changes to this design. Here is something I quickly put together in 5 minutes (literally just five minutes).
I kid you not. This took me just 5 minutes to put together. Snappa is just so easy. If you spend a little more time, you can add images for each of these items on the menu, and make it even more attractive.
Step 6: The next step is to get this printed so you can show this to restaurants you are pitching to.
Restaurant menus are printed on what is called “cardstock” paper. You should find someone in your neighborhood that can print the above template on cardstock for you.
If you can’t find someone, check out PaperandMore – they print one sheet of cardstock for as little as $1.
Step 7: The next step is to literally go door-to-door and pitch your product. If your city has a suburban train network, I would highly recommend getting a monthly pass done.
In New York city, it costs around $120 per month. Sounds high? Consider it as an investment because you are going to cover this expense in just one day.
This is what you do. Pick one random part of your town each day and go there in person. Start walking and get into literally every single restaurant or cafe you can find. In a six hour trip, you should easily be able to cover at least 30-40 cafes.
Tell them you design menu cards and that you are going to offer them something top quality. Show them the menu you have designed.
PRICING: Every person you talk to is going to ask you how much it will cost.
Now I would advise you to experiment with the numbers. You can quote anywhere from $100 to $400 for your service.
But when you are starting out, it is safe to quote somewhere between $150 to $200 for the design and another $10 for every printed menu card delivered.
If they say the price is high, offer a one-time deal of $100 – all inclusive. You can even quote a low-ball price of $50 if you are not very ambitious. You are still going to make a lot of customers.
From what I have seen, if you walk into 40 cafes each day, you should be able to convert at least 2-3 businesses each day.
That’s $300 in revenues per day. $8000-$9000 per month – This is no joke.
Step 8: Design the cards and deliver. Repeat the above process every single day in a different part of the town. By the time you are done, you would have built so many referrals that new orders will come to you. You do not have to travel by train every day.
Website Designer
If you thought menu card designing was one of the easiest businesses to start, this next one you are reading is even easier. However, there are two big differences:
- Designing a website is going to take you a lot more time than it takes to design a menu card.
- You can however charge a lot more money for every website you build. I mean, a hell lot more.
The only major downside is that businesses are not so ready to shell out money for a website as they are for menu card designing. So it is going to take you a lot more convincing to get this done.
Here is the step-by-step guide to becoming a successful website designer.
Step 1: As it is with the previous business idea that we discussed, it is important to have a “portfolio” before you start talking to prospective customers.
Unlike what many people think, you do not have to build a website from scratch. There are apps like PageCloud that you can use to build an entire website in just a few hours.
Let me teach you how.
As the first step, click on this link to visit the PageCloud sign up page.
Step 2: Check the “Agree to the terms & conditions” box and you can either sign up with your social account like Facebook, or sign up with your email address. Click on ‘Continue’ to start your free trial.
Step 3: Once in, you will be asked to pick a website category. Pick ‘Professional Services’ or ‘Small Business’ since those are kind of businesses you will be approaching in this business.
Step 4: PageCloud has an impressive list of templates you can simply click and customize. I created this webpage for a fictitious business “Splendor Salon” in just under 5 minutes. It’s very easy to use.
Step 5: It’s a good idea to have a website for yourself and include links to the webpages you create (like the Splendor Salon one I have created above) in your Portfolio section.
But that is not absolutely necessary. You can also take printouts of the webpages you create and share it as a physical copy.
Step 6: The next step is go find some clients who will pay you to do this work for them. The easiest way to get started is Google Maps. Simply pick a neighborhood in your city or town and search for various types of business on Google.
For example, here in this example below, I am looking for salons in the Queens area of New York city.
Google Maps is great because it immediately tells me which of these businesses have a website and which ones do not.
Like “Salon 25” in the image I have shared above.
Step 7: Ideally, you should pick industries that have a healthy mix of businesses with and without websites.
People in industries where very few competitors have websites won’t bother signing up because nobody else is doing it.
At the same time, industries where almost everyone has a website is a waste of time because you will be going after so few prospects that conversion becomes hard.
Make a list of all such businesses with no websites or with very poorly designed websites.
OR, you can also check for businesses from various industries inside a neighborhood. Make a list of businesses that may be open to hiring you for a website design.
Step 8: This is it – hit each of these neighborhoods every single day and pitch your website design business.
Out of every 30 businesses you talk to, you must be able to convert at least 1 or 2.
Pricing – Now, this is where it gets interesting. The businesses you will be talking to get pitched for website design projects all the time. So you are not the first.
So if you have to convert them, you have to be creative in the way you price your product. Offer these businesses a very cheap way to get a website done.
Typically, a small website design project can cost anywhere between $500 to $3000 or even more.
Many businesses say no to a pitch simply because they do not have so much money lying around.
So, instead of quoting such a large price, offer them a subscription model – you will design and host the website for as long as they subscribe. You can price it as cheap as $75 per month or can go up as much as $200 per month.
It works for you too since you are designing websites on PageCloud which is a subscription business. So anything over and above what you pay for your PageCloud account is profit.
Pricing your product as a subscription can add around 30% more clients.
Product Evangelist/Reseller – Literally walk business to business and make them sign up for stuff with your URL.
How much can you make from this business?
Want to know how much you can make from this business? Let’s say you talk to 30 businesses every weekday.
That’s around 750 businesses in a month.
You can easily convert 25-30 businesses from this.
At $75/month subscription, you can make $1875 in the first month.
You add another $1875 every month.
Which means, by the end of the year, you will be making as much as $20,000 per month. Even if you have to be more conservative, you should be able to make at least $10,000 to $15,000 per month.
All without even knowing how to design or code!
Software Reseller
There are a lot of companies that make software for other businesses. They are called B2B (Business-to-Business) software developers.
A big difference between regular software that people like you and I use (think Netflix, Gmail, etc.), and the software that businesses use is the complexity of the product and as a result, the price.
For example, businesses make use of software applications called ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) that can take several months to just set up in a large organization.
The complexity of setup has come down in a big way these last few years because of cloud apps. However, businesses still take a lot of time to decide what software to settle because they can’t keep moving hundreds of business users from one software to another.
Since this requires a lot of conversation between the software developer and the customer, these software companies partner with people who are called “resellers”.
The job of a reseller is very simple – they sell the product to a customer on behalf of the seller. And they are paid a commission for every successful sale.
Other times, you are called a “white labelled reseller”. In this case, you are free to rebrand the software product as your own and sell it at your own price.
For example, if Microsoft offers a white-label reselling program for MS Office, I can rename “MS Office” to anything I want (how does “Raf Office” sound?) and then sell it at my own price.
So if MS Office sells for $100, I can sell “Raf Office” for $120 and make a $20 profit on every sale.
What happens in these cases is that your customer buys a product named “Raf Office”. But all the technology behind it is owned and managed by Microsoft. You are just repackaging it to something else and make a profit on the sale.
Some of these commissions are recurring (that is, they pay you for every month till the buyer remains a customer). Also, the software companies provide resellers with tons of training material so that you can become an expert at what you sell.
Because most of the work is done by these software companies, your job as a reseller is quite easy. Yes, you need to be good at sales and need to be ready to talk to hundreds of businesses each month, but once you get past that, becoming a reseller is quite simple and an easy business to get into.
I would also advise you to not sell software based on how much they pay. High payout reselling opportunities are also more difficult to carry out.
A good way to become a successful reseller is by picking a product that you understand. I personally would recommend something as simple as text messages.
Think about it – businesses use SMS messages for all kinds of purposes – to send you appointment reminders, to share a copy of the receipt, or simply to wish you on your birthday.
Large businesses with thousands of customers don’t have someone sitting there typing each of these messages out. They have software that do it for them.
Text messaging is no rocket science and all businesses need it. It’s a very good industry to launch your reselling career from.
I personally have experience with TXT180 – they pay 20% commission on every sale as an affiliate – in this case, you sell the software with TXT180’s branding and earn a 20% commission on every sale.
If you sign up as a reseller, you have to pay a small monthly subscription fee. But that allows you to raise the price of a text message to whatever you choose – and pocket all the profit.
This is how you get started.
Step 1: Click on this link to visit the TXT180 website.
Step 2: Scroll down to the very bottom of the homepage. You will find the link to sign up as a reseller. Click on this link and enter all your details.
TXT180 charges under $30 per month to sign up as a reseller. You can quickly recover this money if you follow these steps below.
Step 3: Once you have become a reseller and have completed all the formalities, it is time to make money.
Go to Google Maps and make a list of all businesses in your neighborhood that use or will benefit from a text messaging service. This includes businesses like spas, dentists, chiropractors, carpet cleaners,etc.
Step 4: Before you can start selling, you need to understand what your potential customers want. Hit the first few businesses from the list and ask them questions like these:
- Do they have an SMS provider to send messages to their clients
- What kind of messages do they send to customers
- What is the price-per-SMS with their current provider
Now, compare it with what you have with TXT180. If the customer is paying higher with their current provider, the job is simple – pitch them your product that is cheaper than what they are currently paying.
Or else, try to understand what they use text messages for, and think of a way you can make it simpler.
For instance, one business I talked to sent an SMS to their customer after every service to ask them to leave a review on Google.
I pitched TXT180 as an easy way to upload a list of all their customers and send a message with one push.
It saves them time and provides them value.
You have to be creative with how you pitch the product. There are tons of resources online that help you become a good salesperson.
But to be a good reseller – you just need one skill : be creative to find a way to tell how the product is good for your customer.
The value you pitch HAS to be one of this:
- Saves them time (“one click to send SMSes to all your customers”)
- Saves them money (“our service costs lower”)
- Is better (“Other SMSes get blocked by the network. Our SMSes are not”)
- Is popular (“Our service is used by the city’s biggest mall”)
It doesn’t matter whether you sell SMSes or rocket launch software. If you pitch your product along one or more of the above four factors, it will sell like hot cakes!
How much money can you make with this easy business idea?
Honestly, the answer to this question is, “it depends”. It depends on the products you choose, the number of products you resell, and the kind of clients you work with.
What’s great about this business is that you get to sell multiple products to the same customer – all without having to have your own team of developers.
Let’s go back and look at the money-making potential with the TXT180 reseller partnership.
For resellers, TXT180 charges $20 for 1000 SMSes at the time of writing this article. That is $0.02 per SMS.
However, for regular customers, 1000 SMSes would cost $34.95 – that’s $0.03495 per SMS. Even if you were to sell their product at the marked price, you make a profit of close to ¢1.5.
Assume that the average business you sign up for your product has 200 customers in their list. Assume they send messages at least twice a month. That makes every customer need 400 SMSes per month.
Even if you sign up only 25 customers in a month, you will need a package of 10,000 SMSes per month. In a year, you would have then signed up 300 customers. That’s 120,000 SMSes a month.
On TXT180, resellers pay $1000 for a 100,000 SMS package. You would then be paying $0.01 per SMS.
TXT180 customers who need to send 400 SMSes per month pay around $20. That’s a per message cost of $0.05.
That is, at this volume, you make a profit of $0.04 per SMS – Remember that as a white label reseller, you can mark up the price of your message as you like. So, you could charge much more than $0.05 per SMS.
Anyway, even at this price, you make a profit of $4800 per month.
But you know what’s amazing? As a reseller, you can sell multiple products to the same customer.
So is the spa owner you are talking to also looking for an appointment booking software? You can become a reseller of this product.
Employee time tracking tools, employee attendance management software, email marketing software, loyalty program tools – you name it. You can make a similar profit on each of these products without even acquiring new customers!
It’s not too difficult to make around $15,000 per month being a reseller for 3-4 different software products.
Virtual Assistant
The business ideas discussed until now are easy to execute. Still, they will need a lot of hustling – and you sure must know to talk to people to sell a product.
But what if you cannot or do not want to walk up to hundreds of businesses to pitch a product or service? What if you want to do everything from home?
Virtual Assistant, or VA for short, is a job category that has become really popular in the past few years. The job description is simple – VAs help their clients free up their time by taking up repeatable, easy to perform tasks that can otherwise take several hours.
Here are some things that clients hire VAs for:
- To check their business emails and mark priority emails
- Login to the client’s blog and approve comments
- Pull data from websites – like the contact details of various website owners, their phone number, etc.
- Process monthly reports
- Organizing meetings, sending meeting invites, etc.
- Follow up on invoices
- Create process documents
The pay as a VA is not really all that great. At the lower end, you get paid around $5 an hour to do simple tasks like approving blog comments, while at the upper end, you may expect to be paid around $25-$30 an hour for tasks that need a bit of experience.
So, at the outset, this is an easy business to do, but not one that really pays all that well.
But there are some ways to make a lot more money as a VA. Let me discuss the strategy here.
Subcontracting OR launching a VA agency
Making $5 an hour is not really lucrative. What this means is that clients who hire VAs for such low value tasks face high levels of attrition
I mean, who really wants to stay in a career that pays so less? Most people who take up these tasks are there for a short haul. They switch to a better job as soon as they find one
Which means that the clients spend so much time every month hiring and training new people to do the same job.
This is a real problem that you can solve.
Instead of working on these VA tasks yourself, you could hire and train other people to do this job.
In other words, start a VA agency.
This is how it works. Let’s say the client is ready to pay $10 an hour for a VA to do a certain task. You take on this task and find someone who can do it for $8 an hour. That is a $2/hour profit on this task.
Let’s say you hire 10 VAs to do 8 hour jobs with various clients. That’s 80 hours of work per day. $160 of profit which translates to around $5000 per month.
Here’s the fun part – you could scale this up as much as you want.
At the bottom-end of the VA profile are tasks that you can train anybody with minimum computer skills to do. There are people with a very good grasp of English and computer skills from developing countries like India and the Philippines who would kill for a job that pays $5 an hour.
If hiring and training is not something you want to do all day, you can hire people to do that for you.
So, for every $100 you get paid, you can spend $50 on the Virtual Assistant who really does the job for you, spend another $30 on a manager who can hire and train these VAs, and keep the rest for yourself.
With this model, you can hire as many VAs as you want, and hire as many managers as is needed to run this VA agency.
It is not at all difficult to scale this business to more than $10,000 per month in profit within a year.
All you have to do is to create process documents that you can train your managers with, and who, in turn, can create process documents to train their VAs.
How do you find clients as a VA
If you want to work as a virtual assistant yourself, there are a number of great websites you can get hired from. Simply search for “Virtual Assistant Jobs” on Google and you should find a ton.
My personal favorite however is FreeUp – it’s a network of “pre-vetted” freelancers. That is, unlike other freelancing websites like Fiverr, not anyone who signs up here gets accepted.
This is great for a reason. On other freelancing platforms, there is a huge supply of thirsty freelancers who are willing to do any task at any price. That brings down the cost of projects – and the money you make as a result.
With FreeUp, the clients know that the freelancers have been thoroughly verified. And it’s a much smaller pool of legit freelancers. So, if you do manage to get in, you are likely to make significantly more money than you would on other platforms.
Do you know why else FreeUp is great? Because, you can also use the platform to hire other VAs to work under you.
Yeah, they cost more than other platforms, but you save a lot of time and money in the hiring process – that it makes it so much worth it.
So, if you do plan on starting a VA agency, I strongly suggest that you make use of FreeUp to find the VAs to work under you.
FreeUp is however not ideal to find projects as a VA. You need to be more creative here. Here is my step-by-step process that can help you.
Step 1: Search Google for “Virtual Assistant” jobs. As I had already mentioned, this will throw a ton of results from different websites.
You are not doing this to actually find VA jobs. Instead, I want you to do this to find the kind of tasks that various clients have for their virtual assistants.
Step 2: Go through at least a few dozen job postings to understand the various kinds of jobs you could do as a VA.
Make a list of tasks that you could (a) either do yourself, or (b) train others to do it for you.
In other words, I am asking you to find tasks that you think you are going to be very efficient in. This could be as simple as removing spam comments from a blog, answering emails, or setting up meetings.
You must also make sure that the kind of tasks you shortlist are constantly in need. Let me explain with an example.
There are some clients who use VAs to find best prices of flight tickets. This is great, but the thing is even the busiest businessmen do not make more than a handful of trips in a month.
In other words, you cannot do this task day-in, and day-out.
On the other hand, think of a blog with thousands of visitors. These blogs get inundated with spam comments. You will be spending at least a few hours on each blog a week.
Also, there are hundreds of blogs like this. Which means that you can make sure there is a consistent demand for your job.
Step 3: Establish the specific tasks that you want to do as a VA. It is helpful if these tasks are related or pertain to the same kind of client.
For example, a blog owner who likes to hire a VA for approving comments, may also like them to format blog posts, post on social media, etc.
So find a specific type of client you want to work with and build a list of tasks you want to do for them.
Step 4: Now that you know the exact kind of tasks you want to do as a virtual assistant, the next step is to go find people who will be willing to hire you. But for that, you need to find businesses where these people work.
Google is a good place to start. Actually, strike that. I would recommend you choose Bing.com or DuckDuckGo.com – in my experience, they present a more diverse list of search results which is good in this case.
You have to be creative in your search queries. For example, if you want to make a list of websites that will need someone to approve blog comments, you can try search queries with terms like “View comments” – this will show blogs that have comments enabled.
You can go a step further and add specific industry terms. Car reviews + “view comments” will show a list of auto blogs with comments enabled.
Another example – if you want to be a virtual assistant sending sales proposals and follow up, you simply have to build a list of company with sales functions in them. That’s almost all businesses that sell products or services to other businesses.
Be creative in your search terms and you should be able to make a list of companies you want to reach out.
Step 5: Now that you have a list of companies, you need to know the decision maker for your particular case.
For example, a VA for blog moderation will need to talk to the Content Editor. Someone who wants to send sales proposals needs to talk to the Sales head.
LinkedIn is a great resource to find the right decision makers in a company.
For example, if you want to find the Editor at Entrepreneur.com, you go to the Company page on LinkedIn and click on the list of employees.
Browse through this list and you should be able to find the name of the Editor.
But here is the thing – LinkedIn is not free. Once you hit a threshold, LinkedIn stops showing you anything of value unless you pay to be a Premium member. This costs several hundreds of dollars each year.
Not worth it for most of us.
The easiest way to go around this is with Google Search. So instead of going to LinkedIn directly, go to Google search and enter the following query
site:linkedin.com/in/ Editor “Entrepreneur Media”
Your search results now show the LinkedIn profiles of all people who are working at, or have worked at Entrepreneur Media with titles similar to ‘Editor’.
Browse through the list to find the name of the person you want to reach out to.
Step 6: At this point, you have a list of people and their company website. What’s remaining is for you to reach out to them. I highly suggest you install this extension on Google Chrome.
With this extension, finding the email address of any person is a breeze. Going back to the previous example of reaching the Editor at Entrepreneur. All I had to do was enter the information in my GMail Compose window and I get their email address – just like that.
This is basically it. Reach out to the various decision makers with your proposals. There are tons of guides online that will help you write email copies that convert well.
Some of these prospects may want to talk to you on the phone before deciding. But ultimately, as long as you are offering something of value, this is a business proposal that converts really well.
Cleaning Services (Carpet Cleaning, Window Cleaning, Chimney Cleaning, etc.)
Unlike the business ideas discussed until now, this business I am going to talk about needs capital investment in the form of equipment.
Carpet cleaning machines, for instance, have a starting price of $500. In addition to this, you need other cleaning tools like soap, brushes, etc. You also need a vehicle to carry all of this from one client’s place to another.
And oh, you need experience handling these machines too.
Are you already feeling like you want to skip ahead to the next idea in this list? Hold on. It’s not so bad.
I am going to teach you ways with which you can make thousands of dollars every month offering cleaning services WITHOUT any TOOLS or EXPERIENCE.
But before I discuss that, I need to explain something very interesting about Google.
If you have ever used Google to search for local businesses (like salons, plumbers, or even carpet cleaners), you may have come across this little box in the search results.
This section on the Google search results is called the “One Box”. The interesting thing about what you see in the One Box is that the algorithm that is used to determine what gets shown here is completely independent of Google’s search results.
This algorithm splits local businesses into two fundamental types – businesses that need a physical store, and those that do not need one.
Salons, supermarkets and auto servicing stations are examples of businesses that need a physical presence.
On the other hand, carpenters, plumbers and carpet cleaners are businesses that travel to the client’s location for work. They do not need a physical presence.
You need to remember this very carefully because whatever I discuss here in this section is EQUALLY APPLICABLE to any other business that does not need a physical store.
I’ll explain why later on in this article.
Now, let me get back to what I was discussing before – teaching you how to make thousands of dollars with this business idea without any tools or experience.
Here is the thing – the average carpet cleaner charges around $50 a room. So if the client’s household needed cleaning in four rooms, the cleaner makes around $200.
This is just the revenue. To calculate profits, you need to deduct the cost of your supplies, the depreciating cost of your machine, cost of travel, taxes, and so on.
On an average, the margins in this business are around 60%.
Many surveys show that the average single-man carpet cleaner makes between $50,000 to $75,000 per year before taxes.
That’s okay-ish, but not enough for me to put it in this list. There is a better way to do carpet cleaning and that is exactly what I am going to discuss.
So as I was mentioning earlier in this section, carpet cleaning comes with a lot of overheads.
But guess what – there are tons of people still willing to put in their hard work and money in getting their carpet cleaning business going.
I am not going to ask you to compete with them and put yourself at a disadvantage (given you have no experience, and worse, no equipment). Instead, partner with them.
It’s the Uber model. When you hail a cab using Uber or Lyft, the car that gets sent to you is not owned by Uber. The person driving the car is not an employee either. These drivers are self-employed professionals who Uber partners with for their service.
So when you pay $50 for a Uber ride, the driver probably takes $30-$40 of it, and Uber takes the rest. It’s like a finder’s fee.
This works out great for Uber because they do not have to employ these drivers. They do not need to own these cars. They are not responsible if the car gets into an accident or needs maintenance.
Uber simply focuses on marketing their service and making it easy for customers to hail a cab.
And that is exactly what you are going to do. With carpet cleaners. Without an app.
Here is my step-by-step guide.
Step 1: You need a website. But before you go ahead and build one, you must know what you are going after.
Are you happy with business from just your city?
Or, do you want global domination?
I mean, both of this can be done. The latter is more difficult and is going to take a lot more of your effort. But it’s not impossible.
My suggestion would be to pick a business name that allows you to expand your business without much of a problem.
I mean, if you are “BrooklynCleaners”, you are going to have trouble expanding to another city or even suburb, right?
Instead, look for a domain like “Universal Cleaners” or “Joe’s Carpet Cleaning” – something that you can take with you to any part of the country (or maybe even the world).
Register a domain name: NameCheap is very good for this. Their prices are much lower than what other companies like GoDaddy or Domains.com ask. Click on this link
Step 2: The next step is to build a website for your brand. I have already described the process of building a website without knowing anything about web designing. But in case you are coming to this section directly, here is a brief guide.
1. Go to the PageCloud website and sign up for a Free trial.
2. Once you have logged in, click on the ‘Create a new site’ button.You will be asked to pick a template. Click on the ‘Business’ category and pick one that you like the most. (Don’t worry if you don’t like any of them. All of this can be customized)
3. Go ahead and change the heading, background image and add more information about your business. PageCloud makes it so easy to do all this.
I put together this page below in like five minutes
4. Once your website design is complete, click on ‘Publish Site’ so that you can link the page to your domain name. Your website is now ready.
Step 3: The next step is to create a profile for your business on Google My Business.
Doing this is the first step towards getting your business listed in the “One Box” that I mentioned earlier.
- For this, visit https://www.google.com/business/
- Once you have signed in with your Google account, click on ‘Create Location Group’ and enter the name of your business – say “Joe’s Carpet Cleaners”
- Now, pick this business name from the dropdown, and click on ‘Add Location’ – you can pick ‘Single Location’
- You will be asked to enter the name of your business, your address, and so on. In the end, you will be shown this window
Choose ‘Yes, I also serve them outside my location’.
- You will be asked to enter the areas you serve, enter all the different suburbs and counties within your city. This is important. Don’t be lazy – enter all the major suburbs so it covers the entire length and breadth of your city
- Complete the rest of the form (including your phone number, website, etc.)
You have completed this step. Google will now send you a postcard to the address you mentioned that will be used to verify that you actually reside there. Complete the verification process.
Step 4: The verification process can take at least a couple of weeks to get completed. In the meantime, you can start working on building your business operations.
So, our plan is this. We are going to partner with freelance carpet cleaners in your city (or all the regions you are planning to operate in). Send all the business that comes to you to them – and make a commission on every transaction.
For example, if you get an order for $300, you pass it on to your partner for $250, and pocket the remaining $50.
Easy, no?
But finding the right people to work with is a challenge. Two reasons – if you are hiring an amateur, then you have no idea if they will do a good job. Would they even turn up at the client’s place on time?
They might potentially ruin your brand name, and your customer might never come back to you.
But if you hire an established carpet cleaner, then they may already be charging more than you do. That leaves you with little to no profit.
Here is a workaround that might work – when a customer comes to your website and requests a quote, you process their information and provide them with multiple options to choose from.
An amateur cleaner may cost less, but may not be very efficient. An experienced cleaner may do a great job, but can cost higher.
You can also inform them while sharing the quote that these are independent contractors – this way, a poor job on part of the cleaner will not affect your brand.
You make money by either charging a fixed fee from the cleaner each time you advertise their name to a client. Or, charge them a percent for every transaction.
This sounds good. The next question is where do you go looking for these cleaners.
Google is not a good source simply because people who come to you from Google are going to hit on competitor websites as well.
You should instead check out platforms like Craigslist. It is a good idea to post an ad for carpet cleaners and then talk to people who reach out to you from the ad.
Interview people and make sure they are legit before adding them to your list.
Step 5: By now, I assume you have already verified your address. This means that Google will now start showing your listing for people searching for carpet cleaners from one of the serviceable areas you have marked in your business profile.
But hold on, it’s not so easy after all. The Google One Box has limited space and it is very unlikely for you to start seeing website traffic from Google so soon.
Building visibility on Google local rankings can take time. There is a ton of resources online to help you with this process.
If you are indeed pursuing this business idea and want to become an expert in local SEO, then check out this course on Udemy. It’s a little pricey but is an absolute goldmine for anyone interested in ranking on the Google One Box.
Step 6: Getting customers from Google is going to take a lot of time. You should use this time to find other marketing channels to acquire customers.
Here are some things that can really work
- Send message over local Facebook Groups
- Knock door to door – this is a numbers’ game and you are definitely going tso make at least a couple of bookings every day
- Post on Craigslist
- Tie up with local carpet stops so they would include your business card within the carpet packaging that they sell to customers. You can also offer annual packages to customers.
Step 7: Want to make over $10,000 a month in this business? Then, operating in just one city or location is not going to be enough. You have to expand territory.
Doing that is easy, you simply have to follow the steps mentioned above once again for a new territory.
Except, while you are logged into Google Business, you can choose “Add Location” and add in the details.
Now, here is the thing – when you want to operate in a new city, Google will require you to add a local address that needs to be verified, just like in the earlier case.
You may be tempted to pay someone to use their address. Do know that this is against Google guidelines. You do not want to lose your business because of this.
A good way to go about this is to hire carpet cleaners first in the new territory.
Then, get the business added with the location address of one of these cleaners you sign up. It is a good idea to draft an agreement for use of their space for your business. This tells Google that you have done everything according to the law.
The rest of the strategies remain the same. When you are done with this city, move to the next.
How much money can you make?
Carpet cleaners typically make between $50,000 to $75,000 per year before taxes.
These professionals however have limited resources – they cannot operate in two households at the same time.
With the business model that I have provided, you do not have this problem.
With a 10% commission, you make between $5000 to $7500 off one carpet cleaner per year.
With 5 cleaners, that’s around $25,000 per year.
If you expand to five cities, then you are looking at around $125,000 per year – all with NO Experience, NO Equipment, and NO Employees.
Setting this business up and getting customers can be a little intimidating. But once this is done, the business makes money like clockwork. One of the easiest businesses to start.
Influencer Marketing Manager
Now, the business ideas I have discussed above are easy in a theoretical sense. But to be truly successful, you must hustle – you should be ready to knock doors every single day and make your pitch without getting tired of it.
To be honest, any business that has a low barrier to entry (like the ones I have discussed) requires the entrepreneur to be extremely hard-working. So it’s either hard work, or your skills, or money – you need to have at least one of this to be successful.
I’m saying all of this here because, in my opinion, the business idea I am discussing here in this section is relatively a lot more easier to launch and execute.
You can be a hustler, but can still automate quite a lot of your work. If you are smart about it, this business is also quite easy for you to completely outsource.
So if you have the right processes in play, this can be quite a passive revenue stream.
Ok millennial, what’s an “influencer marketing manager”, you ask.
Let me take a moment to explain this to you.
So you watch YouTube videos.
Remember that annoying girl who reviews lipsticks on her YouTube channel? She’s got like 2 million views on just one of her videos. I hear teenage girls flock to her channel every time a new video is up.
Annoying girl is not alone. There are literally thousands of such social media “celebrities” on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and even TikTok (yeah, this is apparently the next big thing).
Not everyone is annoying. There are some really serious social media influencers. There are marketers who share their marketing experiments and thus enjoy thousands of followers. There are people who discuss entrepreneurship, baby food, women’s health and almost every other topic that people are interested in.
Because these influencers have thousands (or sometimes millions) of followers, businesses are interested in advertising through them.
The advertisement is not always a straightforward sponsorship message. Some businesses pay these influencers to review their product, or give it away for free to their subscribers.
As these influencers are regarded so highly by the people following them, their endorsement carries a lot more weight than what you or I have to say.
An influencer marketing manager is someone who helps businesses work with influencers on marketing campaigns.
Let’s say Nike is launching a new shoe for marathon runners. They are looking for influencers to spread the word about this new shoe to people running marathons.
An influencer marketing manager will do this
- Talk to Nike and understand what it is that they require
- Find influencers who produce content related to marathon running
- Reach out to all such prospects and build a list of interested influencers
- Discuss endorsement ideas (giveaways, product review, etc.)
- Negotiate a price and finalize the deal
- Get paid by Nike, and after paying the influencer, keep the rest for yourself as profit.
Does this look like a lot of work? Well, technically yes. But I am going to teach you how to make this business idea super easy.
Let’s go through this step-by-step.
Step 1: Being an influencer marketing manager is like running a marketplace – you need to find businesses interested in hiring you, and then also find influencers that the business will want to work with.
It’s a chicken and egg problem – who do you reach out to first? It looks like you need to find businesses first, and then find influencers from their industry.
But don’t do that. When you are talking to businesses, they will want to know what influencers you work with. And without a list of influencers at your disposal, you will not be able to get hired.
So this is what you should do, instead.
Specialize in one platform: YouTube, or Instagram or anything else. Pick one that you are comfortable with, and stick with it (at least for now).
Build a short list of industries you want to focus on: I would suggest fashion, auto or tech to start with. They have a lot of good content producers and also businesses that are ready to pay for exposure. For the sake of example, let’s assume you want to go with YouTube channels that review cars.
Build an influencers’ list: Now, the next step is to build a list of YouTube video creators who are potential influencers in this space.
To do this, search for this term on Google
site:youtube.com/user/ car reviews “For business inquiries:”
This is what you are basically asking Google to do: show a list of YouTube user profiles that talk about car reviews and have an email address to reach out to.
Searching this term on Google throws up over a 1000 results, and they take you to pages like these
Notice how you got the email address of the person you want to reach from the channel? Make sure these channels have at least a few thousand subscribers. Lesser than that is not interesting to advertisers.
You can replace “car reviews” with terms like “automobiles”, “car nerd”, “car geek” to get many more channels related to cars that have their emails listed in the YouTube user profile.
Step 2: Gather all necessary details. Do not simply copy just the email address. Get other details like their subscriber count, total video views, profile URL, other channels that they own,etc.
All this is helpful when you want to reach out to a prospective client later on. You could probably say something like “all our influencers have a total reach of over 200 million subscribers”. That is going to blow your client away.
Step 3: Repeat. Once you have around 50-100 influencers from one industry, move on to the next. It’s a good idea to have a large enough database from at least 2-3 industries before you move on to the next step.
You now have around 300 influencers in your database.
Add pricing data (optional): Now, this is an optional step right now. Basically, you could reach out to each of these influencers and ask for their pricing information. Typically, they would say something like “we charge $X,XXX for a 10 minute review”, or “we charge $X,XXX for a sponsored message”.
But in most cases, the influencer is going to ask you for client details before they divulge any pricing information. You don’t have any clients right now. So simply tell them that it’s confidential at the moment.
One point to note here – the price quoted is not absolute. You should be able to negotiate the price down. So do not be flustered if a prospective client is shocked to hear the prices.
Now that you have something cooking on the influencers’ side, the next step is to go and find clients
Step 4: Your job right now is very straightforward. You knock on the door of every business and see if they are interested in a campaign. Virtually, of course.
LinkedIn is a great place to find decision makers across every industry. But it is expensive. It is not a platform for bootstrapped people like you and me.
So here is what I do. I go to Google and search for terms like this:
site:linkedin.com/in/ + “Marketing Manager” + Bank
The ‘+’ sign in the above query is not necessary. I have added it merely to show you that the query is made of three parts.
- The first part tells Google that it needs to show me results from ‘linkedin.com’. User profiles on LinkedIn end with /in/. So by adding that in the first part of the query, I tell Google to only show me user profiles from LinkedIn.
- The second part of the query tells Google to restrict the results to profiles that contain the term “Marketing Manager” in them.
- In the third part of the query, I have included the name of the industry I am interested in. You can replace ‘Bank’ with terms like ‘software’, ‘eLearning’, ‘SaaS’, etc. to specify other industries
Now, to be honest, this is not a foolproof method. But it does show me a highly narrowed down list of LinkedIn users who mostly meet the criteria I have specified
Step 5: Next, you are going to be reaching out to all these different prospects pitching an influencer marketing program. But to do this, you need their email.
I highly highly recommend you to install this Google Chrome extension from Reply.io
Once you have it installed, getting the email address of any person is a breeze.
So let’s say I want to reach out to Jeff Bezos from Amazon.com. All I have to do with this extension installed is to enter “Jeff Bezos @amazon.com” in the ‘To’ field of GMail.
Like this
The extension will automatically pull in the right email address that you can click to send.
You know the best part? It’s FREE.
This is what you are going to do.
- Click on the Google result and visit the LinkedIn user profile page
- Copy their full name and store this separately. Preferably in a Google spreadsheet
- Scroll down the profile page to the ‘Experience’ section. Here, click on the company that is most recent.
- You are now at the Company LinkedIn page of the person you want to reach out to.
- Click on the ‘Visit Website’ button on this page. You now have the website URL of their company.
- Enter the user’s full name and the company URL in the GMail compose window to get the email address of this person.
All this sounds like a lot of work. But in reality, it only takes a few seconds to complete each step. You should be able to get at least 40-50 email addresses in an hour.
Still don’t want to do it? Here is how you automate it
Go to the Freeup website – this is like Fiverr or Upwork. But I really love this website because every freelancer you meet here has been vetted. The money you spend on a project is still the same, but the quality is vastly better
Or, click here to sign up on Freeup directly
Hire a Basic Level freelancer – these guys come really cheap at around $5 to $10 an hour
See the bulleted list of things to do to find email address above? Simply copy those instructions and pass it on to them
So for like $5-$10 a day, you can get a big list of business emails everyday
Step 6: The next step is to reach out to these businesses with a proposal to partner.
In my experience, “short and sweet” works. Also, seeding a use-case within the email works really well?
Here’s a recommended email template. You are free to tweak it and experiment with other variations.
Subject: Partnering with <business name>
Hi <recipient name>,
I am the CEO of <fictitious marketing agency>. We connect businesses like yours with YouTube influencers who appeal to your target group.
Our influencers reach an audience of over 2.5 million <car enthusiasts/tennis players/etc.> across the United States. We can help you reach this audience through targeted reviews from our influencers.
Can we discuss this further?
Regards,<your name>
You may either send these emails yourself or hire another freelancer from FreeUp
Quick tip: Do not send all these emails on the same day. I would recommend experimenting with a dozen emails each day and see response rates. You may then tweak the text, change the send timings, etc. every day in order to arrive at the best response rate.
Following up is absolutely crucial. You won’t hear from some people until you have checked with them about your proposal at least 3-4 times.
You can automate this process too with FreeUp. .
Step 7: You will now start seeing interests. Some people you reach out to will be happy to discuss everything over email. Others want to talk over the phone.
Personally I would HIGHLY RECOMMEND that you carry out these conversations yourself in the beginning. This will give you a good idea of what questions get asked, what pricing your clients are interested in, and so on.
But once you have a fair idea of how it works, hit up FreeUp once again and hire a sales assistant. These are freelancers who are good at making sales calls over the phone.
You can prepare a call script and also a list of frequently asked questions, objections and responses.
These guys can easily make 20-30 calls in a session. This is a cheap and effective way to conduct business.
Step 8: Finally, once you have a business that is ready to take the plunge, you may be required to coordinate between the business and the influencer.
This is a very straight-forward thing to do. Influencers produce the content and all you have to do is plug the conversations back and forth.
I would HIGHLY RECOMMEND taking an advance payment (at least 15%) from the client once they have expressed interest and get the rest paid before commissioning the work to the influencer.
This is because influencers demand total payment before they start working. You don’t want to be in a situation where you pay for influencers from your pocket and the client never pays you for the work.
How much can you make with this business idea?
This idea is HIGHLY profitable. Influencers with thousands of followers, typically charge $5000 to $10,000 for exhaustive reviews.
You can charge 10% of this as your commission (that’s a lowball. You can charge as much as 20% too if you are a good negotiator).
So that’s $500 per campaign at the lowest side. A typical client would hire at least 2-3 influencers at a time. That’s $1500-$2000 with one conversion.
If you automate this entire process, you can easily carry out projects for 5-6 clients in a month. That’s $7500 to $12000 with very little work.